Walker Scobell bursts onto the screen in The Adam Project as 12-year-old Adam Reed, a shaggy-haired, clumsy kid running away from a pack of school bullies. He may not look like an action protagonist, but when he finally opens his mouth, Deadpool comes out. “Did you order a bully kit starter pack on Amazon or something?” he sneers at the boy who just punched him in the face.

It’s uncanny to hear the kind of snappy, snarky delivery movie star Ryan Reynolds has honed over the years come out of a 12-year-old’s mouth. And yet, that ability to mimic Reynolds is exactly what got Scobell the part. 

Directed by Shawn Levy, from a script by Jonathan Tropper, The Adam Project is a time-traveling epic about fighter pilot Adam Reed (Reynolds), who crash-lands into 2022 and teams up with his 12-year-old self (Scobell) to save the future. Scobell and Reynolds share multiple scenes, which meant that whoever played the younger version of Adam would have to be believable — even when faced with the real deal. 

Casting director Carmen Cuba auditioned 376 kids in her search for the perfect actor to fill those shoes. Rather than focus on looks, she says she was on the hunt for a more subtle, harder to define quality. Google a picture of 15-year-old Reynolds in his acting debut, Nickelodeon TV’s Fifteen, and you’ll see that he and Scobell share “energy,” as Cuba calls it, rather than physical resemblance.

Walker Scobell’s Audition Tape for The Adam Project

“Even when somebody doesn’t look exactly like the person, if they have an energy about them that’s similar, you almost start to believe that they look like them,” Cuba tells Tudum. “[Walker] had an energy that was very similar to Ryan’s, which is a hard thing to match. It’s the sort of a thing that you can’t teach someone how to do.”

What Cuba didn’t know at the time was that Scobell had been studying Reynolds’ inflections and mannerisms for years. An avid fan of the Deadpool franchise, he’s been preparing for this role since he was 7. “I’ve watched Deadpool 2 way too many times,” the now 13-year-old from Erie, Pennsylvania, tells Tudum. He adds that his favorite aspect of Reynolds’ performance is the speed with which he manages to hit different emotional notes. “He’s being really funny, but also really sad at the same time,” Scobell says. “You’re laughing while you’re crying. I really like that.”

Doane Gregory/Netflix

Scobell almost missed his big chance to play the part. According to Cuba, the search for young Adam originally began back in April 2020, with plans to start production in July. “It was really the first time that I’d done chemistry reads on Zoom,” says Cuba, who has cast everything from Matrix Resurrections to Stranger Things and The Power of the Dog. “For it to be Ryan Reynolds with these little kids trying to be Ryan Reynolds was surreal. During the middle of lockdown.” Reynolds initially read opposite five potential young Adams, but the pandemic stalled the project for several months. In August 2020, the search resumed, and Cuba received a self-taped audition from Scobell, who had no past professional acting experience. 

“It’s pretty significant that he had not done anything before,” Cuba says. “It’s very unusual that he would be able to pull off a role like this without ever having been on a film set or a TV set. Not only are you learning all of those things, you’re also opposite Ryan Reynolds, who you’re a gigantic fan of, having to have all of these lines and a really huge part. He seems to be kind of a savant.”

Scobell sent in his audition tape on August 4, 2020. Just 18 days later, he was staring at his acting hero through a screen for a chemistry read. “I was really nervous,” he says.

But his palpable chemistry with Reynolds is obvious, even from that first read together.

Their relationship continued throughout the shoot, with Reynolds doling out paternal advice and even acting lessons to his young protégé. “He told me to keep my head screwed on tight,” Scobell says. “He taught me a bunch of things, like how to say things differently — he taught me how to scream.”

Wait — how to scream? “I was really nervous to scream,” Scobell explains. “I was self-conscious about it. So he told me, ‘Imagine you’re in the middle of a football field, and your dad is on the other side, and you’re trying to get his attention.’ That helped.”

Reynolds also made himself available on days he wasn’t on set, coaching Scobell on everything from difficult line readings to how to react in any given situation. “Shawn would actually call Ryan and ask him to say a line a certain way so I could get it into my head and say it just like him,” Scobell says. 

Reynolds wasn’t the only idol Scobell got to meet during the shoot. The Avengers fan also got to pal around with Mark Ruffalo, who plays Hulk in the superhero franchise and stars as Adam’s dad in The Adam Project. “That was awesome,” Scobell gushes. “He’s really nice. After we were done shooting, he sent me a Funko Pop of Hulk. That was very, very cool.”

Scobell’s portrayal of young Adam is so convincing that it’s easy to forget he’s a real-life kid. That is, until he tells the story of his discovery of the candy at craft services on his first day on set, which caused him to part with a milk tooth. And then another. “By the end of the shoot, I’d lost four teeth.”